Ballinasloe

A town at an old crossing of the River Suck, on the Galway-Roscommon border, built around a castle that guarded the ford. Its October horse fair is reputedly the oldest in Europe, draws up to 80,000 visitors, and marked its 300th anniversary in 2022. Supermac's opened its very first restaurant here in 1978.

There are Bronze Age sites in the area, and crannóg and ringfort sites in Garbally Demesne. Tradition credits St Grellan with building the first church. Richard Mór de Burgh is credited with founding the town in the early 13th century, and a castle was built on the east bank of the Suck in the 12th or early 13th century and later rebuilt or expanded by the O'Kellys of Hy-Many in the 14th century. The Annals of Lough Cé, for 1114, record a hosting that crossed to Dun-Leodha, given as the original name of Ballinasloe.

Much of the town centre was laid out in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and limestone buildings such as the Garda station and courthouse of about 1840 show its 19th-century prosperity. The Connacht Asylum opened in 1833. Town commissioners were set up on 22 February 1841 and built a gasworks for public lighting. The workhouse opened in 1842 for up to 1,000 people, but the 1851 census found 2,487 inmates there. In the 2009 floods the Suck burst its banks and about 40 families were taken out by boat.

Drawn from the History section of the Wikipedia article on Ballinasloe ↗, rewritten here and adding nothing it does not say; licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

• St. Cuan's Well · holy well · 12 km
• Cloonigny Castle · castle · 10 km
• Ballymore Castle · castle · 11 km
• Clonbrock Castle · castle · 14 km

Straight-line distances from the town centre, from each site's documented coordinates.

• Clonmacnoise · The monastic city at the crossroads of Ireland, Shannon and Esker Riada, where kings were buried and Vikings, Irish and Normans all came to plunder.
• Aughrim · 12 July 1691: the bloodiest battle ever fought in Ireland — 7,000 dead in an afternoon after a cannonball took off the Jacobite general's head.
• Clonmacnoise — the ship in the air · An anchor came down out of the sky during Mass and caught in the church door; a sailor climbed down the rope to free it and began to drown in our thicker air. Watch the story grow: the annals of the 740s say only that ships were seen in the air. A dart at a salmon over Teltown comes later, the anchor and Clonmacnoise later still. By the 13th century the Norse were telling it as their own.

All of these are pinned on the Hidden Ireland map.